Holographic Schwinger effect

We study tunneling pair creation of W bosons by an external electric field on the Coulomb branch of N=4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory. We use AdS/CFT holography to find a generalization of Schwinger's formula for the pair production rate to the strong coupling, planar limit which includes the exchange of virtual massless particles to all orders. We find that the pair creation formula has an upper critical electric field beyond which the process is no longer exponentially suppressed. The value of the critical field is identical to that which occurs in the Born-Infeld action of probe D3-branes in the AdS(5)×S(5) background, where AdS(5) and S(5) are 5-dimensional anti-de Sitter space and the 5-sphere, respectively.